by Morrissey
In what could be termed sheer panic I buy a drum kit, and suddenly I am in mortal danger of doing something productive. The kit fills the bedroom, for the house itself is far too small, and of course a drum kit cannot be played softly. I stare at this mountain of glamor far more often than I slip onto its stool, because each time I thwack out my Paul Thompson formulations I am tearfully useless, and there is no one to ask. Inside my head there is mocking laughter – a little boy play-acting as people passing the house look up to the window as the pitiful search for scrambled rhythm sounds like someone dismantling bits of furniture. Instead, I will dream the dreams of others, as shimmer by shimmer, the kit and my hopes are dismantled – unable to touch the desire it arouses. Indulgence is rarely projected freely from this particular body, and only the act of waiting registers the truth of the feelings within. Unfortunately, what I am waiting for is myself, as others hahahaha on streets where squabbles threaten and desire is dread.
Robert Herrick (1591–1674) writes in what is termed ‘duple rhythm’, which is a ploy of two syllables per line – almost like two tapping feet responding to each other:
Thus I
Passe by,
And die:
As one,
Unknown,
And go.
The secrets of the female form are Robert Herrick’s poetic pleasures, and he writes repeatedly to his ‘mistress’ Julia:
Julia, when thy Herrick dies,
Close thou upon thy poet’s eyes;
And his last breath, let it be
Taken in by none but thee.
Although they who write modern pop songs could never deliver lines as strong as Robert Herrick’s, there is no one else appointed to attempt such, just as there is no one else so freely delegated. Blend noise and words and save the world. I say this not to myself, but to an imaginary upstart – out there, somewhere – for even the lyrics in the songs that I love are by no means fine art; they merely fit well beside the dexterity of voice and instrument. Stripped of sound, the lyrics of most pop songs are artful dribble; artful as in Dodger, and dodger as in wily. I am caught by what could be and should be, as the sagging-roof poetry of Shelagh Delaney’s rag-and-bone plays say something to me about my life. Showing a very considerable understanding of life is Melanie Safka, who is from Queens, New York, and is fortified with such songs as I really loved Harold, Some say I got devil, Johnny boy, Tuning my guitar, I don’t eat animals and Close to it all. It is folk music, it is pop music, but it is also using recording as a lecture platform, and the sincerity in the voice is overwhelming.
My mother had decided to call me Steven after the American actor Steve Cochran, who had died in 1965, the year of Grandad’s and Ernie’s deaths. No biographies of Cochran have ever existed, but his extraordinary face and gangster swagger leap forwards with sexual antagonism and vendetta smiles. In Tomorrow is Another Day (1951), Slander (1957) and I, Mobster (1958) he is malevolently magnificent, hooded by virulent beetle-brows and brute lure. At 48 he had a heart attack and died whilst adrift off the California coast with a yacht full of young females. A post mortem probably wasn’t necessary.
Nellie is my father’s sister, and in 1973 she innocently asks me: ‘Have you considered being a butcher when you leave school?’ Nellie is thoughtful – and very kind, but her question is met with a silent howl. Why would I want to butcher anything? Her home town of Dublin offers Patrick Kavanagh, who died in 1967 at 62:
On Pembroke Road look out for my ghost
Disheveled with shoes untied,
Playing through the railings with little children
Whose children have long since died
and, wrongly, unnecessarily, this child weeps, full of the foolish embarrassment that his father has clearly marked out. New air is discovered in the words of A. E. Housman (1859–1936), scholar-poet, vulnerable and complex. On the day of his twelfth birthday his mother dropped dead, sealing a private future of suffering for Housman, who was said to be a complete mystery even to those who knew him. With no interest in applause or public recognition, Housman published three volumes of poetry, each one of great successful caress, each a world in itself, forcing Housman into the highest literary ranks. A stern custodian of art and life, he shunned the world and he lived a solitary existence of monastic pain, unconnected to others. The unresolved heart worked against him in life, but it connected him to the world of poetry, where he allowed (in)complete strangers under his skin. In younger years he had suffered from the unrequited love of Moses Jackson, the pain of which was so severe that it doomed Housman for the rest of time. All of his work would be governed by this loss, as if life could only ever offer one chance of happiness (and perhaps, for every shade and persuasion, it does?):
When the bells justle in the tower
The hollow night amid,
Then on my tongue the taste is sour
Of all I ever did
Housman suffered throughout his life, and therefore (and not surprisingly) his life became an unyielding attempt not to cooperate. The black horizon never shifted, and his emotional lot never mellowed.
He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
and went with half my life about my ways.
At his Wildean lowest, Oscar’s personal sadness had never slumped to such leaden fatigue; Housman suffered and accepted, death always close in his mind’s eye – but not regrettably so.
I did not lose my heart in summer’s even,
When roses to the moonrise burst apart:
When plumes were under heel and lead was flying,
In blood and smoke and flame I lost my heart.
I lost it to a soldier and a foeman,
A chap that did not kill me, but he tried;
That took the sabre straight and took it striking
And laughed and kissed his hand to me and died.
The published poetry makes the personal torture just barely acceptable. The pain done to Housman allowed him to rise above the mediocre and to find the words that most of us need help in order to say. The price paid by Housman was a life alone; the righteous rhymer enduring each year unloved and unable to love:
Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all’s over:
I only vex you the more I try.
All’s wrong that ever I’ve done and said,
And nought to help it in this dull head:
Shake hands, here’s luck, goodbye.
But if you come to a road where danger
Or guilt or shame’s to share,
Be good to the lad that loves you true
And the soul that was born to die for you
And whistle and I’ll be there.
It’s easy for me to imagine Housman sitting in a favorite chair by a barely flickering gas fire, the brain grinding long and hard, wanting to explain things in his own way, monumental loneliness on top of him, but with no one to tell. The written word is an attempt at completeness when there is no one impatiently awaiting you in a dimly lit bedroom – awaiting your tales of the day, as the healing hands of someone who knew turn to you and touch you, and you lose yourself so completely in another that you are momentarily delivered from yourself. Whispering across the pillow comes a kind voice that might tell you how to get out of certain difficulties, from someone who might mercifully detach you from your complications. When there is no matching of lives, and we live on a strict diet of the self, the most intimate bond can be with the words that we write:
Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what’s to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.
I ask myself if there is an irresponsible aspect in relaying thoughts of pain as inspiration, and I wonder whether Housman actually infected the sensitives further, and pulled them back into additional darkness. Surely it is true that everything in the imagination seems worse than it actually is – especially when one is alone and horizontal (in bed, as in the coffin). Housman was always alone – thinking himself to death, with no matronly wife to signal to the watching world that Alfred Edward was now quite alright – for isn’t this at least partly the aim of scoring a partner: to trumpet the mental all-clear to a world where how things seem is far more important than how things are? Now snugly in eternity, Housman still occupies my mind. His best moments were in Art, and not in the cut and thrust of human relationships. Yet he said more about human relationships than those who managed to feast on them. You see, you can’t have it both ways.
Who on earth is Patrick MacGill, who in 1916 wrote:
Over the top is cold, matey –
You lie on the field alone.
Didn’t I love you of old, matey,
Dearer than the blood of my own.
You were my dearest chum, matey –
(Gawd! but your face is white)
But now, though reliefs ’ave come, matey,
I’m goin’ alone tonight.
I’d sooner the bullet was mine, matey –
Goin’ out on my own,
Leavin’ you ’ere in the line, matey,
All by yourself, alone.
Chum o’ mine and you’re dead, matey,
And this is the way we part
The bullet went through your head, matey,
But Gawd! it went through my ’eart
Partial disclosures of male closeness fascinate me, because it’s something that is nowhere in the life around me. All males are adversaries in muggy Manchester, and it is now my grim intent to break spells. Meanwhile, I live my life in slow motion. And what drove Oscar wild?
Lily-like, white as snow
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone
Lie on her breast;
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.
Peace, peace; she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet;
All my life’s buried here
Heap earth upon it.
As the world’s first populist figure (first pop figure), Oscar Wilde exploded with original wisdom, advocating freedom for heart and soul, and for all – regardless of how the soul swirled. He laughed at the squeezers and the benders and those born only to tell others what to do. Tellingly, a disfigured barrister and a half-wit in a wig destroyed Wilde in the end, and in doing so one lordly barrister and one lordly judge deprived the world of further works from Oscar Wilde. Solitary confinement was deemed judicially right for the man who had brought more positive change and excitement and fun to the London literary world than anyone else – dead or alive. With childish exuberance, an abstract High Court judge with the full force of jealousy issued a judgment equivalent to the death sentence, oh so inflamed and burdened by correctness was Justice Wills. Out of sheer envy of Wilde’s genius, Wills got at that genius as best he could, for judges in high-profile cases want to be remembered somewhere (anywhere!) in history’s grubby footnotes. Rather than say something helpful, the judge’s only way to out-shadow Wilde was to present a sentence that was internationally gasp-worthy in its excess, and thus came the ruling that killed off the writer who has yet to be matched or equaled, even now, one hundred and ten years after Wilde’s death. The law is often wrong, but Justice Wills – who killed Oscar Wilde with the most severe sentence that the law allowed – knew exactly what he was doing, and acted with the dubious belief that Wilde must be destroyed in order to save the world from homosexuality. It was only by this that Justice Wills nailed his place in history. Float the Wills name through judicial records and you will find it unconnected to anyone but Wilde. It is important to judges to believe that their chosen profession is a difficult one of ‘difficult’ decisions, but this is how they themselves describe it only in order to make a plea for any impoverished decisions that they might clumsily make along the way. But it is they who choose their profession and it is they who allow themselves to be led by the unrestricted freedom that their profession allows. How does British society identify wayward judges? It doesn’t, because it isn’t allowed to. Identification can only be made by yet another judge, who is unlikely to point the finger at a colleague lest suspicion is returned from whence it came. When is a judge ever asked to account for his own words? Never. Barbarity might mount upon barbarity, but the British public has no legal right to question a judge on the grounds of bias – not even in a democratic society. But what if a judge could be proven to have been biased? One would need to convince another judge of this first, and no judge would ever be prepared to blow that particular whistle. If one fell, they’d all fall.
In her agony my sister walks home from school each day near to tears. She, too, cannot take one shadow more of her teachers – most of whom are children of the 1920s. Jackie is hounded and hawked by one teacher in particular, whose name is Miss Lewis, whose obsessive persecution of Jackie has a daily determination that never tires. The world has now moved on, quite naturally, from the draped and hooded heap of black that were 1970s schooldays, and the harrowing harassment by 1970s schoolteachers of children in their charge would now quite rightly be identified as criminal behavior. The Manchester Education Committee themselves were their own critical guide, which equals the Metropolitan Police dealing with complaints against their own officers (well, there are unlikely to be any charges made). The Manchester kids of my circumstances learned a sense of humiliation as a priority before they learned anything else, and it is perhaps this that separated them from the generation that followed, and we all find ourselves antiquated at some stage due to the irascible march of time. My years at St Mary’s may have damaged me forever, but warm to the skin was that final July when St Mary’s slithered its last heave of hatred, and freedom held out its hand for me to take it. Full of faulty development, I walked away, not an hour richer, with boyhood’s fire doused, yet determined not to drown.
Jon Daley walked along Great Stone Road towards the Hardrock wearing silver knee-length boots, tight sky-blue jeans, blouse open to expose hairless body and flat belly, his spiked yellow hair expertly snipped, his eyebrows shaven off; nail polish and thin silver bracelets completing the dare. He looks sensational, as if plucked from the interplanetary beyond, living the trans earth Bowie reflection as beautiful creature – fearless and resolute. So striking is he that a passing lorry slows down beside him and gruff voices call out in order to throw Jon off balance (well, this is the north) – a compliment, of sorts, since it proves just how much you are getting at people, pinging their own self-doubts. Jon doesn’t flinch. In this year of Aladdin Sane, Jon is the cover artwork in living form. The afternoon sun burns as Jon makes his way alone. I have no hesitation in approaching him – so fascinating is his appearance against the walls of Old Trafford Cricket Ground. We instantly have much to discuss, although my own slavishly dull school uniform is wretched compared to Jon’s intergalactic grace. Jon is five years older than I, but shorter and thinner, and lives at 12 Reather Walk in Miles Platting (or Collyhurst – if you must) with his extremely Irish parents and his two giddy sisters. He is, without doubt, my first glimpse of modern art in motion. In fact, he works for a catalogue company somewhere beyond Piccadilly train station, and he tells me that he generally minds his own business. I am astounded at his survival in child-eating Collyhurst, so unforgiving and Jack Smethurst blunt. As I approach Jon’s house an enormous dog bounds towards me from nowhere, jumps up on my head and knocks me to the ground, and then runs off with a mouthful of my left trouser leg.
‘O
h, hello,’ smiles Jon. Somehow he sails through – laughed at by children and pitied by adults. How does he do it? And where, in Newton Heath, are silver knee-boots to be found? Well, evidently somewhere. Although the brain is well-stocked and the conversation plentiful, Jon has no friends at all. We meet every weekend in central Manchester (or ‘in town’, as locals will say) and we walk for hours; through Back Piccadilly and Tib Street’s underbelly where blind mice are stacked pathetically in pet shop windows – ready to be sold as your pet snake’s soup. Wherever we walk, heads turn to examine Jon, who is neither loudly burlesque nor gay-faced, but is instead quietly unassuming and mildly oblivious to the cage of Manchester. Every inch of the city center is marked, every sunless side street, every tired shop front measured; from Grey Mare Lane eastwards, over to scuttling Salford, and everything in between. For almost two years Jon and I will be occupied with each backland enclave of Victorian Manchester (especially since Manchester remains almost exclusively Victorian), like Betjemanesque church-steeple fanatics we wonder at door cases of Corinthian plaster, or at narrow seventeenth-century passages, and we lust over neo-gothic rain-sodden yards. On tiptoe we would stretch to examine bits of glass on fortress doors, anciently engraved as the last of the old land. A timber staircase down an alley off Great Ancoats Street leads us nowhere; helpless against Edwardian decay and war damage. The scars of Hitler remain evident in 1970s Manchester where businesses somehow continued in rooms of drear on semi-derelict streets. Beyond leftover Shudehill and the deathbound dark shadow of Victoria Station, Jon and I would encircle Strangeways prison, still leaned on by slum streets and courtyards, and we wonder at the bored-stiff inmates, lost in a cauldron of quiet questions. We would sit in sunless turn-of-the-century pubs and ponder the slowness of distant days – of bodies dumped by the Quality Street Gang, ghosts and outcasts and diseased lovers of 1888 – and how we too are part of the process of time frittering away. Queen Victoria had visited Manchester in the 1840s and had remarked upon its destitution as despair previously unseen, and she also remarked upon the sickly look in the faces of Manchester folk (even though she herself was without doubt the most unfortunate-looking woman on the planet). Manchester repaid her unflattering comments with a fat, black statue in Piccadilly Gardens. Why did they bother? What had she ever done for Manchester but criticize it? 1840 was a time when Manchester’s poverty and violence outstripped even London’s hard-as-nails East End inferno.